


For Every Day I Love You More

by cecilia095



Category: New Girl
Genre: Break Up, F/M, Marriage Proposal, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-04
Updated: 2017-01-04
Packaged: 2018-09-14 19:52:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9199973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cecilia095/pseuds/cecilia095
Summary: "You're my best friend and you were once my girlfriend for a long time -- in Nick Miller Dating Years, anyway, so I'm always gonna know all these weird, useless facts about you in the back of my head, just... just sitting there until the day I die."





	

**Author's Note:**

> I missed writing for you all so I wrote this.
> 
> <3

Robby breaks up with her on this random Tuesday.

"The 'oomph'," he starts, "...it just... stopped."

Jess thinks the 'oomph' was never really there, but she just twirls her tea bag around in her mug and swallows thickly and tells him she'll be in her room if he needs anything, "But try not to need anything."

—

Reagan and Nick get into it on Wednesday. She storms out of his bedroom, and when they re-tell the story to Jess, Cece and Winston mention that ' _things were said, things were thrown, and someone cried -- and it was_ not _Reagan_ '.

Reagan sleeps at her secret, not-so-secret apartment that night and Thursday night and Friday night and Saturday night, too.

Jess doesn't beg Nick for any details because she's supposed to be sad about Robby right now, not overly-happy about Reagan and Nick fighting.

—

On Sunday, Jess pops over to the bar because Cece is working and she needs to clear her head and order five glasses of pink wine and not remember her own damn name, and...

"Jess?" Nick looks up from the glass he's vigorously cleaning and waves her over. The bar is empty because it's three o'clock in the afternoon on a Sunday and everyone else has lives, or something. "What the hell are ya' doing here?"

"You're definitely not Cece," she says, trying to laugh.

"Not even close, although we did show up to work in the same flannel yesterday, so..."

Jess sits herself down in one of the stools, one a little farther away from Nick, and she folds her hands on the bar top and asks him for a glass of wine.

"How about an Old Fashioned?", he says instead, and Jess's stomach pangs with a little bit of nostalgia. That's their thing, the Old Fashioned. Or it... was?

So Nick makes Jess and Old Fashioned and it's quiet for a few minutes until he clears his throat and goes, "I'm guessing you know about me and Reagan?"

"I actually don't," Jess replies quickly, impatient for an explanation. "What -- What happened?"

"More like what  _didn't_ happen," he says, shaking his head. "Do you have time or am I interrupting one of yours and Robby's weird living room karaoke dates?"

"No, that's... Those are over. Robby dumped me. He said the 'oomph' was gone. Whatever."

"Wait... You're not -- I'm sorry, Jess. I like the dude. He's a good egg. I mean, I don't know that he's the best egg for  _you_ , but he's a good one."

"I know," she says, swallowing hard, and then she waves a hand at him. He slides her drink in front of her and laughs uncomfortably. "I'm always talking about myself. What happened with you? And Reagan? It's not over, is it?"

He sighs for a long time, and then he says, "Probably."

Jess just raises a brow at him.

"I don't know. She still has that secret apartment even though she says she only keeps it for the sick barbecue grill and that just... pisses me off, man!"

"Because you want her  _not_ to have a secret apartment."

"Well... yeah. I want her to want to be in my apartment, our apartment, all the time."

"To be fair to Reagan, Winston's cat  _did_ scratch her on the face while she was napping the other day, so that could totally be the reason."

" _Jess_..."

"What?! It's a theory!"

"I don't think Reagan's supposed to get rid of her secret apartment because I don't think -- Wait. Hey. Why do we both go through the same crap at the same time, Jess?"

Jess wants to answer so badly but instead she just shakes her head and takes a long swig of her drink. It stings the back of her throat, and she curses Nick in her head for not letting her go with wine. Damn you, nostalgia and Nick Miller.

"I don't know what's going to happen between you and Reagan, or me and Robby, but I do know that it'll all fix itself one day. I think."

"Will it, though?"

—

Winston proposes to Aly on a Monday. She just got home from her FBI training and he does it in the middle of the doorway back at the loft (traditional) and she screams "YES!" and then goes, "WAIT, WHERE'S THE RING?!" and Winston screams back and goes, "FERGUSON WAS SUPPOSED TO BRING IT OUT! HOLD UP!"

Jess races to the kitchen and finds a (very old) bottle of champagne and pops it right there in the living room and it splashes all over Schmidt but he's too happy for Winston and Aly that he doesn't even bitch about it getting all over his Calvin Klein sweater.

"What made you say yes so soon?", Jess nosily asks Aly when it's just she and Aly and Cece bullshitting on the couch hours later. "Not that it's any of my business, but you haven't been dating  _that_ long."

"What if I never had the opportunity to say yes again, you know?", Aly says, and Cece widens her eyes and goes, "Wow,  _deeeeep_ ". It is deep, and true. Jess wonders if she'll ever have the opportunity to say yes to being Nick's  _anything_ again. She takes a painful gulp of very old champagne and then stands up from the couch and announces that she's going to bed.

—

Robby shows up at the loft on a Wednesday, over a week after Winston and Aly's engagement. "Hey," he says casually, and he doesn't even reach out for a hug.

Jess is having an ultra lonely week, so she goes for one, and Robby doesn't hesitate to hug her back, raising his eyebrows at her once she pulls away. "I just... came over to give you you your backscratcher back. Thanks for lending it to me for so long."

She takes it from his hands and presses her lips together, mouthing a little, "You're welcome" at him before he turns around to leave. "Wait. Robby?"

He pushes up his glasses and tilts his head at her. "Yeah?"

"Why couldn't we have... you know... the 'oomph'?", she asks him, and she's one-hundred percent serious.

"I feel like we did, in the beginning. Or at least we both kind of thought it was. But I don't know, the whole time I just felt like... I don't know. Are you sure you don't have the oomph for someone else?"

Jess doesn't want to answer him.

"Jess?"

"Huh? I don't know. I don't know, Robby."

"I think you do, but I think you're scared because that it might be gone on his end."

Jess plays with the handle of the backscratcher and takes a deep breath. 

"It's probably not," he says bluntly. "I mean, are you forgetting how much I hung out over here?"

Jess laughs under her breath and points the backscratcher at him. "Thanks for this. And that."

—

On Friday, Jess steps in a puddle at work and ruins her new flats. Then, a bird shits on her car in the middle of traffic  _right_ where she needs to see and she hits someone's bumper. The guy bangs her for her insurance and goes, "Do you not know a Benz when you see one?", and then he flips her off. Good things are happening to everyone around her and all she has is soggy flats and a skyrocketed insurance rate.

When she gets back to the loft, Cece and Schmidt are standing with their hands both folded in front of them, being weirdly quiet, and they tell everyone to have a seat.

"After months of vigorously trying -- and I mean  _vigorous_ ; I've got nothing left down there --"

" _Schmidt_."

"-- Cece's pregnant," he says, and he sounds serious and choked up.

Everyone reacts at once, jumping all over Cece and Schmidt, and Winston grabs Cece by the arms and shakes her and goes, "I knew there was something you were hiding from me!"

"Your friendship," Schmidt says, pointing at his wife and Winston, "still freaks me out."

"Get used to it. Uncle Winston ain't goin' nowhere!", he says, clapping his hands together and going on and on about how good of a babysitter he is.

Jess toes off her disgusting flats and sets down the police report from her little rear-end incident on the coffee table and she squeezes Cece. "I'm so happy for you, Ceec. I was starting to think I'd have to offer up my box to you guys."

Cece smiles, but then she looks confused. "Oh. You're talking about surrogacy," she laughs. "No. I'm three months along, we made sure."

"Good. You guys are going to be ridiculous parents, and I mean that in the best way."

—

"A baby...", Nick says to her on Saturday morning as he's pouring his Cocoa Puffs, trying to get the last of the bag in the bowl. 

"I know," Jess says, grabbing the empty seat next to him and snatching the cereal box out of his hands. He throws her  _a look_ and she says, "What? You're going to spill it all over and Schmidt  _just_ bleached the countertop for us."

"He doesn't even live here anymore, I don't get why he still comes over and cleans three to four days a week. It's weird."

"Hey, his kid'll have the cleanest nursery in Los Angeles," Jess jokes.

"No shit. I can't believe that son of a bitch is about to be a father. Where's my baby? I'd be a cool dad, Jess."

"Yeah, sure, Nick," she laughs. "I feel that way too. I mean, Cece's a wife and a mom-to-be and all I do is ruin really expensive flats."

"Wait, what? The ones you got at the outlet mall last month? Damn."

"How the hell do you remember that?", she asks, squinting her eyes at him and grabbing a spoon off of the counter, pointing it at him accusingly.

"I remember everything you tell me, you weirdo. I mean, you talk enough, so..."

"Shut up."

"Third grade: You brought in a toad for show-'n-tell and cried when a kid in your class called it ugly. You own forty-six iBooks and you've read them each three times. You secretly like that your middle name is Christopher; it makes you feel cultured and different in a weird way I'll never understand. You're my best friend and you were once my girlfriend for a long time -- in Nick Miller Dating Years, anyway, so I'm always gonna know all these weird, useless facts about you in the back of my head, just... just sitting there until the day I die."  

"Nick, what are you doing?"

"Robby said the 'oomph' was gone. Reagan has a secret apartment because she knows my 'oomph' isn't for her."

" _Nick_ ," Jess repeats, "what are you  _doing_?" She sounds mad even though she wants this, she just -- Why is it happening like this, and now, and isn't he still kind-of, sort-of with Miss "I Have My Own Apartment And I Haven't Called In Weeks"?

"We could've had everything our friends have right now if I didn't mess up."

"Hey," she whispers, grabbing onto his wrist, "it wasn't just you."

"Right, you got mad at me for having a box of unorganized papers in my closet. Totally rational! You wanted to help me raise my credit score, Jessica! That's it! That's the only bad thing you did, and it wasn't even bad, it was you being an angel!"

"Inside voice, Miller, inside voice..."

He sighs and puts his opposite hand over hers, still on his wrist. "I just want to be in love with my best friend again, okay?"

"I can't. I'm not doing that to Reagan."

" _I'm_ doing that to Reagan," he says, shaking his head. "She'll thank me in a few weeks when she realizes this whole thing was just rushed and spontaneous and... You know we've never said 'I love you'?"

"Yeah, I know, Winston told me."

" _Winston_?"

"He knows all of the Loft Secrets, okay?"

"Duh."

"Look, I'm not saying I don't want this Nick. I want this more than anything in the world. I just want it to be right."

"What's ' _right_ ', Jessica? We never do anything right and we're still alive! I mean, do you remember that time we put together that IKEA bookcase for Cece and Schmidt's house?"

"Horrible job on both of our parts. You threw the directions in the fireplace!"

"They're a waste of trees! I'm a man, Jessica, I can figure out how to put together a friggin' bookcase."

"Clearly, you can't," she says, locking eyes with him. It's the first time she's genuinely _looked at him_ looked at him without freaking out in weeks (months?).

"It doesn't need to be right," Nick tells her, looking right back at her with the same fierceness. "It just needs to happen."

Without another thought, Jess nods and grabs Nick by the face, kissing him with all the 'oomph' in the world.

—

Nick proposes to her on this random Tuesday.

It's so... Nick-like. She's finally going back to school after six days at home from a bad case of the flu. Her hair is tossed up in a messy bun, she has on mismatched flats that  _almost_ look like the same shade of navy blue, and she's pretty sure she still has sick-breath. You know, the flu and all.

She walks out of their bedroom and sniffles. Nick is nowhere to be found, but Aly and Winston are eating waffles at the island in the kitchen, and Cece and Schmidt are feeding their two-month-old baby in a highchair next to them. 

"Oh. Hey." Schmidt casually waves her over. "You know how to get stains out of things, right?"

Jess squints her eyes at him. She's gonna be  _so_ late. "Um, so do you, idiot."

"Yeah, but not this onesie," he says, pointing at his daughter's outfit that looks perfectly clean.

"There's nothing on the --"

Nick walks out of the bathroom then, shushes everyone, and then walks over to Jess, taking her hands in his. "Read the onesie."

Cece and Schmidt step aside, and Nick lifts their daughter out of her highchair, dangling her in Jess's view. Schmidt won't let Jess hold her because, "Flu germs. I will kill you."

So Jess starts to read the onesie, and then she can't finish because she's too busy tearing and sniffling and tearing and sniffling, waving her hands frantically in front of her eyes as if she's embarrassed to cry in front of anyone. (She isn't, obviously. She's the Resident Loft Crier.)

"Fine. I'll read it if you can't. It says, " _Will You Marry My Uncle Nick_?", Nick says bluntly, and then he hands their daughter back over into Cece's arms and kneels down in front of Jess. "Well...?"

Jess's face pales, and she covers her mouth, letting out a little gagging noise.

"Oh my God," Aly whispers from her spot in the kitchen. "Is this really happening?"

"Jess, Jess, honey, what --"

"Flu. Still. Gonna puke."

"Are you  _kidding_ ," Schmidt says, throwing his hands up in defeat. "Damn you, influenza!"

Jess races to the bathroom, Nick still knelt down on the floor, his hands shaky with an open ring box in them.

She does her thing and then she finds Nick, still on the floor after minutes and minutes of her puking up her intestines in the bathroom.

"Jessica, I'm sorry, you don't have to --"

"Yes. Yes, Nick, yes. I mean, you picked the  _worst_ day to ask me to marry you because I just took my temperature in the bathroom and it's almost hospital-worthy, but  _hell yes_. Yes, yes, yes."

"Phew." Nick doesn't care that she has sick-breath or clammy hands or a 103.0 fever. He stands up and grabs her in his arms and picks her up by the waist and tells her that she's going to be his wife  _and_ his best friend for the rest of his life, and, "How cool is that?"

"Super cool babe, but please put me down before I puke all over you."


End file.
